Maura Conlon-McIvor: Depth Psychology 2004

Maura Conlon-McIvor Ph.D., (2004 graduate from Depth Psychology) is the L.A. Times Best author of She's All Eyes: Memoirs of an Irish-American Daughter (TimeWarner) which recently had its world premier stage adaptation. Maura's work has been featured in PEOPLE, ELLE, Glamour, CNN.com, and other publications.

Maura's current interest is teaching others the use of "fresh language" to re-vivify notions of sustainability and the felt sense of belonging to the world. Maura's presentation "Belonging to the World: Depth Memoir and Re-enchantment with Cosmos" will be featured at the October Toward a New Renaissance conference in Pari, Italy, sponsored by the Scientific and Medical Network.

How do we revivify an enchanted relationship with the cosmos when the predicament of our post-modern life tilts on the abstractionism of our felt subjectivity? In this presentation, "Depth Memoir and Re-Enchantment with Cosmos," I describe the importance of the powerful images from our first 14 years of life. Bachelard calls this emotional landscape our "first time" in which everlasting, psychological values of our belonging to the world take root. As adults, we forfeit this co-creative, imaginational intelligence for the dogmatic, ego-centrism of an anthropomorphic superiority. Bringing in the perspectives of Jung, Peat, Kidner, Hillman, Heisenberg, and Bachelard and work from my own recently published memoir, I describe how these early images expose us to archetypal eternals of awe and reverence. With a renewed imaginational intelligence, we transcend "the precisions of the social memory" as we return to a "cosmic memory" which is the very memory of our belonging to the world.

For more information, go to mauraconlon.com, paricenter.com, scimednet.org.